Like many high street retailers, New Look has placed a strong emphasis on cost control in all its retail stores in the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
Overview
Like many high street retailers, New Look has placed a strong emphasis on cost control in all its retail stores in the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
John Mathers, the company’s Utilities & CRC Manager explains:
“New Look is very conscious of the impact rising electricity price pressures has on both our business and the value we offer to our customers. We are also conscious of the impact energy use has on the environment from carbon emissions. As a result we want to become as energy efficient as possible, not only to bring down our overall energy costs to benefit our customers, but also to minimise our impact on the environment from energy use.”
He continued, “Each year, the energy market seems to grow more complex, and with seemingly ever present threats from rising energy prices, accurate forecasting and budgeting for anticipated store specific energy costs and consumption is vital.“
Staff engagement
In order to better control our store electricity costs and make the electricity consumption reductions necessary, New Look has given each store in the UK an electricity cost and consumption target. In order to achieve these the company turned to energy data management experts, IMServ over four years ago. Using IMServ’s Data Aggregation and Data Collection services, along with Automated Meter Readings (AMR), New Look introduced AMR meters in order to provide stores with accurate retail store electricity consumption information for each half hourly period.
New Look also worked with IMServ to set up and manage a monthly store energy league table utilising Energy Data Vision (EDV), IMServ’s powerful web tool, to capture and visualise energy consumption across all stores. Communicated via New Look’s intranet service, ‘Buzz’, the report provides individual stores with specific energy efficiency ratings relative to each peer group.
This provides a highly detailed insight into usage, CO2 emissions, and comparisons of energy consumption across all sites, both in trading hours and out of hours. It also gives a forecast of annual consumption and highlights areas where individual stores can improve their energy efficiency by identifying time periods and days when electricity could have been used more efficiently by each individual store.
“A bit of healthy competition has also proved a big motivation. Our store managers can be very competitive and reducing energy consumption sensibly across our retail store estate is certainly not a short term project – it’s an on-going energy management commitment. IMServ is always on hand to advise and help us find new ways to control and reduce our energy costs.”